There are many independent laptop PC manufacturers in Japan. Panasonic Let's Note (cf. http://panasonic.jp/pc/ ) is known to have excellent battery life while being decent. Laptops from Mouse Computer (cf. http://www.mouse-jp.co.jp/ ) have almost no pre-installed crap. Unfortunately, many of them don't sell outside the country. They're probably too small/thin to Western people. People tend to think a 17-inch laptop "giant" here.
We Need a Better PC
131–140 of 699 posts
Re: We Need a Better PC
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
never brake? :))) Apple hardware is build to fail, 35 years and they still make computers like we are living on Arrakis and moisture doesnt exist.
Well I'll put it this way: I've owned three Windows laptops and one Mac and the Mac has outlasted all three individually, two of them combined, and on track to outlast all three of them combined in the next year. It also has yet to slow down. But that's just my anecdotal experience. Think of it what you will.
Same experience here. 1 MBP has outlasted (and is still working like new in most important respects, including battery life) the combined lifetimes of all 3 plastic garbage Windows laptops I've owned before getting this one. That's 5 years and change, still counting.
I'm no Apple fanboy, but the difference in hardware quality is incomparable in my limited experience.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#133I'm using a Microsoft Surface Book. Works great.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#134[deleted]
Re: We Need a Better PC
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is certainly not true. You can basically get any package with Homebrew that you can on Linux, (assuming it's on GitHub, you can get all of them) in fact there's even a port of it to Linux for people that love it on Mac.
Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. I'm not sure how you can argue otherwise.
Homebrew is really, really good about about giving you guidance to fix failed installs.
"Homebrew failed to do thing...here's exactly the commands you can run to make this thing work now though if you are so inclined."
apt fails? Good luck
Re: We Need a Better PC
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. I'm not sure how you can argue otherwise.
How is it not as good? I'm genuinely curious because I've used apt on debian derivatives and rpm on red hat and I prefer brew to both of them. My favorite is actually Nix/Guix but I haven't bothered to set it up on my daily driver.
A few reasons:
- you have way more packages on any Linux package manager.
- Linux package managers do not mess with /usr/local as expected in a UNIX compatible OS. Homebrew does. Linux package managers run as root, not in user-space.
- Apparently Homebrew gets broken by Apple software/OS updates.
- Linux package managers are an integral part of the OS environment and update process - it's structured this way even for critical system and kernel patches.
- Aptitude, for example, gets rid of older versions of packages, while Homebrew keeps all previous versions and simply changes the symlink. Cleanup is also automated in Linux package managers, not Homebrew as far as I know.
- Homebrew sometimes pulls up sources to compile software locally, while Linux distros usually pull up binaries (except AUR on Arch or Portage on Gentoo, or Sbopkg on Slackware). While compiling from source is nothing wrong, it can take a lot of time depending on what you are building.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#137Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…
+1 to this machine. I bought one for my wife last June and so far it's been great.
As a side note: Asus's naming sure could use some help. If I search the Microsoft Store's website right now, there's a Zenbook UX305FA, 2 UX305CA's, UX303UB, and two Zenbook Pro UX501JW's. I'm sure if I searched Amazon I could find even more unique names. I consider myself a pretty savvy PC shopper and even I find that incredibly confusing.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#138Do you like the MacBook but don't like the OS? go ahead and change it, you can have triple boot. Tiny fonts and pop ups doesn't have anything to do with the machine you are going to buy (unless you also want the website). HP makes the elitebook, magnesium construction a la thinkpad. And last but not least I would like to give this entry the RAGE post award, nomination points for What I want is a computer with: -Decen…
Add me to the rage brigade. I think the OP has missed the Microsoft "Signature" edition products. They're a clean Windows 10 image and you buy direct from Microsoft. I just wish they'd sell me the XPS 13 9350 (the highest spec'd one) in Australia. Edit: AFAICT a lot of the battery life on a MacBook comes from the way OS X works - friends who use Bootcamp tell me it significantly reduces their battery time.
> Edit: AFAICT a lot of the battery life on a MacBook comes from the way OS X works - friends who use Bootcamp tell me it significantly reduces their battery time.
It's not just OSX—even using Safari instead of Chrome or Firefox adds over an hour to my battery life (god knows there's no other reason to use it). As of ~1 year ago when I worked somewhere that required me to use lots of tablets from both Apple and a variety of top Android manufacturers on a regular basis, battery life (especially idle battery life) on the Apple devices was borderline miraculous while the Android devices seemed to treat the battery like an infinite resource—the difference was not subtle.
I'd love a world in which it seems like any company other than Apple holds battery life as a high priority. My observation has been that we do not live in that world. They're the only hardware manufacturer I've seen that gives more-or-less honest battery life estimates in their marketing, and those figures are not low. It'd be really, really hard for me to jump ship solely for that reason.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#139The article ignores the Surface Book (thought it does mention the Surface itself), Razer Blade and Dell XPS lines which are all pretty renowned for their quality. OEMs make some crappy PCs, no doubt...but it has gotten a lot better in the past 2 years. HP's Spectre is also a really nice device.
Re: We Need a Better PC
#140Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…
I'm really happy with my Toshiba Tecra Z series. The article totally missed Toshiba, which is still a decent manufacturer.
I get 5-6 hours of battery life with real usage, close to 10 hours in "green" mode, I've got a 15.6" screen, a keypad, 16Gb of RAM, an i7 processor, and a 1Tb SSD. And it's just over 4 pounds and pretty thin. I have NVIDIA graphics. The Tecra Z has an available 3K touch display, and its HDMI port can power a 4K monitor at 60Hz (even while its internal monitor is still going, and its USB3 port is powering a third monitor; that's my office development setup).
I've had it over a year and a half already, and it's still going strong.